Charles Larmore

History & truth

History, according to Schopenhauer, to create new needs and burdens. Mod- teaches but a single lesson: eadem, sed ali- ern democracies, despite their promise, ter–the same things happen again and do not end the domination of the many again, only differently. “Once one has by the few. Progress is bound to seem an read Herodotus, one has studied enough illusion if we look at life from the out- history, philosophically speaking.”1 side, abstracting from our own convic- If, like Schopenhauer, we survey hu- tions about nature and the human good. man affairs from afar, assuming the For then we cannot make out the extent stance of a neutral spectator, suspending to which our predecessors, despite their all our own interests and commitments, defeats, were still on the right track. All we will have to agree. At so great a re- that we will perceive is their inevitable move, what else will we see but, as he failure to accomplish the ends that they said, countless variations on the same set themselves. History will serve only to old theme of people pursuing dreams remind us that man’s reach always ex- they never achieve, or ½nd disappointing ceeds his grasp. when they do? Yet ordinarily we think quite different- Consider the cardinal cases where his- ly than Schopenhauer did about the past, tory is held to do more than repeat itself, and about modern times in particular. In where it supposedly shows direction and reflecting on the course of the last ½ve progress. Theories that scientists in one hundred years we usually conclude that age endorse meet nonetheless with refu- great strides have been made in under- tation in the next. Technological innova- standing nature and in creating a more tions aimed at easing man’s estate go on just society. Patterns of scienti½c and moral progress come into view, once we Charles Larmore, Chester D. Tripp Professor in lean on established conceptions of na- the Humanities at the University of Chicago, is ture and scienti½c method, of individual the author of ½ve books: “Patterns of Moral rights and human needs. Classical me- Complexity” (1987), “Modernité et morale” chanics constituted an advance over (1993), “The Morals of Modernity” (1996), Aristotelian physics, we then say, be- “The Romantic Legacy” (1996), and “Les pra- cause it came nearer to the truth about tiques du moi” (2004). matter, force, and motion, and perceived

© 2004 by the American Academy of Arts 1 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World As Will and & Sciences Representation (New York: Dover, 1969), sup- plements, chap. 38. 46 Dædalus Summer 2004

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/0011526041504498 by guest on 01 October 2021 more clearly the importance of results dence when articulating its vision of History & expressible in the form of mathematical the progressive dynamic of modern truth laws. So too in the moral realm: for all thought. A prime example of this ten- its imperfections, the rise of liberal de- dency is Condorcet’s famous essay on mocracy represented a turn for the bet- progress (Esquisse d’un tableau historique ter when measured against the convic- des progrès de l’esprit humain, 1793). Once tion that political life, particularly where people in the West, he argued, threw off coercive force is involved, ought to re- the yoke of tradition and recognized at spect the equal dignity of each of its last that knowledge arises only through members. careful generalizations from the givens When we abandon the view from no- of sense experience, scienti½c growth where and turn to appraising the past and moral improvement were bound to by our present lights, new doubts arise, accelerate as they had since the seven- however. Relying as they must on our teenth century. current ideas of what is true, important, In a similar spirit, we may believe that and right, our judgments about progress our present point of view amounts to can begin to appear irredeemably paro- more than just the current state of opin- chial. We may wonder whether they ion, because we have carefully worked amount to anything more than applaud- over existing views in the light of rea- ing others in proportion to their having son. We may regard ourselves as having happened to think like us. Is not the no- achieved a critical distance toward our tion of progress basically an instrument own age, even as we avoid the detach- of self-congratulation? What can we say ment of Schopenhauer’s neutral specta- to someone who objects that our present tor. For reason is not a view from no- standpoint is merely ours, with no more where. It lines up the world from a spe- right than any other to issue verdicts up- ci½c perspective, de½ned by the princi- on earlier times? ples of thought and action it embodies. It allows us to determine which of our One way of handling this worry has present convictions may rightly serve as long proved immensely influential; in- standards for the evaluation of the past. deed, it taps into the dominant strand of Consequently, the judgments we then Western philosophy. Philosophers since make about scienti½c and moral prog- Plato have generally believed that there ress will not simply express our own exists a body of timeless, universally val- habits of mind. id principles governing how we ought to Or so it seems. The rub is that our con- think and act, principles that, they have ception of the demands of reason always also supposed, we can only discern by bears the mark of our own time and striving to become timeless ourselves. place. To be sure, some rules of reason- Standing back from all that the contin- ing, such as those instructing us to avoid gencies of history have made of us, view- contradictions and to pursue the good, ing the world sub specie aeternitatis, we are timelessly available. But they can do can then take our bearings from reason little by themselves to orient our think- itself. ing and conduct; they have to work in Theories of scienti½c and moral prog- tandem with more substantive princi- ress are very much a modern phenome- ples if we are to receive much guidance. non, of course. But the Enlightenment, The reason to which we appeal when which pioneered them, still found con- critically examining our existing opin- genial the ideal of reason as transcen- ions must therefore combine both these Dædalus Summer 2004 47

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/0011526041504498 by guest on 01 October 2021 Charles factors. And yet the more concrete as- rightly corrected the errors of those Larmore on pects of what we understand by reason before them. Still, we have to admit that progress involve principles we have come to different improvements might also have embrace because of their apparent suc- been possible, and that our present view cess in the past, or because of our gener- too may have to be revised. Even though al picture of the mind’s place in nature. the standards we invoke for judging our- As these beliefs change so does our con- selves and the past may be the best we ception of reason, and earlier concep- have, they can seem therefore too much tions sometimes turn out to look quite a hostage of chance and circumstance to mistaken. justify any conclusions about progress. Once again, Condorcet’s essay offers a perfect illustration. His con½dence in the In order to grasp the exact import of existence of elementary sensations un- these doubts, we need to keep in mind colored by prior assumptions and con- the difference between growth and prog- ceptual schemes belongs to a brand of ress. Take the case of modern natural sci- empiricism, triumphant in his day, that ence. No one can plausibly see it as a we can no longer accept. Our own no- mere succession of different theories, tions of reason, however self-evident each one a fresh speculation about the they seem to us, may well encounter a world. In antiquity and the Middle Ages, similar fate. But even if they do not meet the study of nature did often look like with rejection, they will certainly appear that–and parts of the social sciences dated, shaped as they are by the particu- still do. Beginning in the seventeenth lar historical path that our experience century, however, physics and then and reflection have taken. chemistry and biology turned them- Doubts of this sort about progress selves into cumulative enterprises. They have intensi½ed over the past century, as set their sights on securing conclusions reason has shown itself to be less a tribu- solid enough to be passed on as guiding nal standing outside history than a code premises for future inquiry. In large part expressing our changing convictions it was the combination of mathematics about how we ought to think and act. and experiment that made this possible; Hegel already undertook to ‘historicize’ experimental laws in mathematical form reason, though he managed at the same lend themselves to precise testing and, time to hold on to the idea of progress. once con½rmed, are unlikely to be dis- His strategy was to claim that the “Bac- credited later, even if they have to be chanalian revel” in which one concep- ½ne-tuned in the face of new data. At tion of reason has succeeded another the same time, their precision helps to exhibits in hindsight a pattern with an orient further research, setting limits on inner necessity: each conception of rea- the hypotheses that henceforth are to be son proved unsatisfactory in its own taken seriously. Not by accident, the his- terms and could only be remedied by its tory of modern science displays a clear successor–until there emerged our own line of development leading to our pres- conception (that is, Hegel’s), which ent conception of nature. Each stage alone lives up to its own expectations. along the way has extended and correct- Today our sense of contingency is far ed the achievements of its predecessors. too acute for any such story to appear Growth in this sense is unmistakable. credible. We may believe that our pres- To be sure, growth has not always pro- ent conception of reason has improved ceeded by simple accretion. Sometimes upon preceding ones, which themselves new theories have appropriated previous 48 Dædalus Summer 2004

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/0011526041504498 by guest on 01 October 2021 results by recasting them within very which that growth is thought to be ad- History & different conceptual vocabularies. vancing. Now common opinion holds truth Sometimes well-corroborated theories that science aims at the truth and that have had to be rejected because they therefore its astounding growth in the failed to square with newly available evi- modern era represents progress in the dence. And sometimes these two kinds direction of that goal. So simplistic a of theory change have gone together– statement certainly calls for some im- as in the scienti½c revolutions dear to mediate quali½cations. The modern sci- Thomas Kuhn, in which one “paradigm” ences of nature do not seek truth in gen- replaces another by means of a “gestalt- eral, as though scienti½c knowledge switch.” It is nonetheless true that the were the only sort worth having. They revolutions occurring within the mod- focus on the natural world and they de- ern sciences of nature, as opposed to vote their energy not to merely piling up those that preceded or inaugurated truths (the more the better), but to as- them, have typically carried over an ac- sembling truths that can help explain the cumulated stock of experimental laws. workings of nature. Moreover, the truth Maxwell’s equations, for example, sur- at which science aims need not be a sin- vived the advent of relativity theory, gle, rock-bottom order of things, as de- even though they had to be reconceived ½ned, for example, by microphysics. Na- as making no reference to a luminiferous ture may embrace an irreducible plurali- ether. ty of levels of reality. Kuhn complained that science text- Yet these amendments do not address books write the history of their disci- the fundamental objection that the com- pline backward from the present, dis- mon idea of modern science has come to guising its dramatic twists and turns as provoke: that the concept of scienti½c step-by-step contributions to the pres- progress begins to appear suspect once ent-day edi½ce of knowledge.2 No doubt we recognize the historical contingency they do distort the past. Yet only in mod- of the standards we use to judge the ern times have such textbooks played present and the past. If our current view much of a role at all. Only recently has of nature counts as well founded only by it become both possible and essential to reference to a conception of reason that expound past results as a body of sys- itself arises from the vicissitudes of ex- tematic doctrine, complemented by perience, how can we maintain that its problem sets and answer keys. The very improvement on previous views repre- prominence of these texts testi½es to the sents progress toward the truth? The cumulative character of modern science. question does not challenge the exis- Growth is not the same as progress, tence of scienti½c growth: plainly, since however. Progress means movement to- the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ward a goal, whereas growth is essential- there has been a steady accumulation of ly a retrospective concept, referring to a experimental laws, and where earlier process in which new formations theories met with dif½culty they were emerge by building upon earlier ones. corrected in ways that produced the Progress generally entails growth, but it body of knowledge now expounded in posits, in addition, a terminus toward the textbooks of the various disciplines. But with what right can we regard this 2 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scienti½c process as leading to anything other than Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of simply the prevailing opinions of the Chicago Press, 1970; original edition, 1960), 136ff. day? Why should we suppose that it has Dædalus Summer 2004 49

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/0011526041504498 by guest on 01 October 2021 Charles at the same time brought us closer to the gressing toward the truth as the para- Larmore on goal of discovering the truth about digm of those illusory stories, or meta- progress nature? narratives, by which modernity has sought to give its achievements a univer- Kuhn gave eloquent expression to this sal legitimacy.4 Historicist attacks on widespread skepticism. Though he con- scienti½c realism, as we may call them, tinued to refer to ‘progress,’ the term as stem from an important insight. Con- he used it meant solely growth in puzzle- trary to one of the deepest aspirations of solving ability. Progress toward the truth the Enlightenment, if not of philosophy seemed to him an idle notion, irrelevant in general, reason does not pry us free to the analysis of modern science: “Does from the contingencies of time and it really help to imagine that there is place. Substantive principles of rational- some one full, objective, true account of ity are always framed in the light of be- nature and that the proper measure of liefs and ways of life bequeathed by a scienti½c achievement is the extent to past that could have turned out other- which it brings us closer to that ultimate wise. goal?” His answer was no, since “no All the same, the contemporary skepti- Archimedean platform is available for cism about progress also trades upon a the pursuit of science other than the his- false assumption, which it shares with torically situated one already in place.”3 the ideal of transcendent reason it re- Scientists do not decide among rival the- jects. The givens of history are not ob- ories by invoking truth as a standard. Or stacles, but means. Reasoning from if they do, it is but shorthand for the where we ½nd ourselves is the very way principles on which they actually rely, by which we match our claims against namely, the methods and scienti½c val- the world. Creatures of chance though ues sanctioned by the present state of we are, the world itself remains the ob- inquiry. Truth–that is, nature as it is in ject of our thinking, and the reasons we itself–makes sense as a goal only so long ½nd to prefer one belief to another must as reason is thought to offer the means be understood as the reasons we have to for pulling ever closer to it. Once the think we are drawing closer to the truth. ideal of reason as transcendence loses its plausibility, giving way to the recogni- There is no better way to develop these tion that science always takes its bear- points than to look in some detail at the ings from a historically determined body most famous skeptic writing today. Rich- of beliefs, our understanding of the aim ard Rorty, a self-styled “left-wing Kuhn- of science must be similarly downscaled. ian,” provides the clearest expression of Its goal, Kuhn claimed, consists in solv- all that is right- and also wrong-headed ing the puzzles that current doctrine in the antirealist philosophies so com- happens to pose. mon in our culture. Unlike many other This mode of argument has become a friends of truth and progress, I shall not familiar refrain in many areas of con- be engaging in a round of Rorty-bashing temporary thought. It fuels, for example, in order to declare victorious, as though the vast company of postmodern theo- by default, the orthodox views he seeks rists who regard the idea of science pro- to overthrow. Enough has already been 3 Kuhn, The Structure of Scienti½c Revolutions, said, I trust, to evidence my sympathy 171; and Kuhn, The Road Since Structure (Chi- 4 See Jean-François Lyotard, La condition post- cago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 95. moderne (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1979).

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/0011526041504498 by guest on 01 October 2021 with the historicized concept of reason are laboring to attain and that, once History & that serves as the springboard of his achieved, will show us the world as it truth thinking. I intend instead to lay bare the really is. Or, more exactly, Rorty’s posi- single line of argument that, amidst his tion is that we do not need to think in changing formulations and proliferating these terms. The idea of such a view- references to other ½gures, ties together point plays no part in our actual deci- his work as a whole. My object is to sions about what to believe. Truth, not locate the spot where insight turns into being ‘out there,’ does not therefore con- error. stitute a goal of inquiry, and scienti½c Common sense says that there is a progress cannot mean getting closer to world ‘out there’ that exists independ- the truth. What progress does signify for ently of the mind, and Rorty wisely de- him, as for Kuhn, is not strictly progress nies that it is his wish to doubt so plain a at all, but rather growth: an increased fact. Even where we do shape the world ability to make successful predictions.5 to suit our purposes, we proceed by ex- “The world does not speak,” Rorty ploiting the laws of nature at work in the likes to quip, “only we do.” We have no things around us. But truth, Rorty in- other vocabularies than the language sists, is not similarly out there. Truth is games we have invented ourselves. Since a property of the sentences we utter, a truth is always judged by their means, he property we judge by standards we our- has occasionally gone on to announce, selves invoke. Although sometimes the in an evident desire to disconcert, that relevant standard may demand that we truth is something made rather than simply look and let the physical world found in a reality lying outside our forms determine the truth or falsity of a given of speech.6 statement (e.g., “the cat is on the mat”; It is tempting to snap back that while “the proton has crossed the cloud cham- our sentences are manifestly our own ber”), our very idea of when perception creation, what renders them true or false can settle an issue, as well as the inter- –namely, the world–is not. True state- pretation we then place on what we see, ments are made, but their truth is not depends on a whole web of other beliefs made; it is discovered.7 This easy rejoin- and ways of dealing with the world. To der misses the point, however. It fails call a statement true amounts therefore to do justice to the historicist insight in- to saying that those who share with us a spiring Rorty’s and many others’ rejec- certain framework of beliefs have reason tion of traditional ideas of truth and to endorse it. progress. What sense can there be in Being true is not, of course, the same holding that truth is found, if the very as being justi½ed. Yet for Rorty the fact standards by which we determine truth that a statement justi½ed by our lights and falsity–in other words, the roles we might still turn out false signi½es only 5 Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress (Cam- that a better view of things may come bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), along in which the statement would no 5, 39. longer pass muster. The distinction be- tween ‘true’ and ‘justi½ed’ serves, he 6 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidar- argues, simply a cautionary function, ity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, warning us that we may always ½nd rea- 1989), 6–7. son to change our minds. ‘True’ does not 7 See John Searle, “Rationality and Realism,” refer to some ½nal point of view that we Dædalus 122 (4) (Fall 1993): 55–83.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/0011526041504498 by guest on 01 October 2021 Charles have the world play in shaping our thinking is most pro½tably understood Larmore on thinking–are as much a product of hu- not as trying to determine what we truly progress man history as the beliefs they serve to owe to one another, but as constructing evaluate? Reason, it then seems, does increasingly inclusive communities in not teach us how to let the world make which free and open discussion replaces our statements true or false; it shows us force. Agreement, not truth, is Rorty’s how the world as presently conceived preferred idiom for formulating his bears on the statements we happen to “pragmatism.” utter. If truth is not found, why not then The classical pragmatists (Peirce, conclude that it must be made? James, and Dewey) always looked with Nonetheless, precisely because he con- suspicion at philosophy’s habit of set- siders truth to be of little consequence in ting up dualisms, particularly those that our actual decisions about what to be- oppose the absolute and permanent to lieve, Rorty eschews in his more careful the relative and changeable. Theory and moments the contrast between making practice, reason and experience, duty and ½nding. If truth is indeed an unin- and desire do not exclude one another, teresting notion, it scarcely deserves to they insisted, but work together from be the object of a striking theory. We are different angles to help us make sense of indeed to discard as useless the mantra the world. Rorty also prides himself on that science and morality aim at the being an antidualist. Yet he seems un- truth about nature and the human good. able to state his position without resort- But Rorty’s more considered proposal is ing to one or another philosophical dual- that we learn to regard their goal as seek- ism of just this sort–if not ½nding ver- ing to expand the horizons of intersub- sus making truth, then objectivity versus jective agreement, accommodating new solidarity. His dualist rhetoric is not ac- experience and hitherto neglected inter- cidental. Le style c’est l’homme même. Ror- ests. His favored contrast becomes one ty has staked his all on playing off a his- between objectivity and solidarity. If ob- toricized concept of reason against the jectivity means taking our bearings from idea that inquiry aims at the truth; the reality itself, it needs to give way to the conventional antithesis between time- more coherent ideal of striving for soli- less truth and human mutability struc- darity, the unforced agreement with oth- tures his thought from the outset, and he ers. We do better to make hope rather cannot escape its hold simply by trying, than knowledge–reasoning together as he does, to downplay the former’s rather than answerability to the world– importance by arguing that only the lat- our highest aspiration.8 For science itself ter matters. does not undertake to discover more and Herein lies Rorty’s fatal mistake. For more of the truth about how nature consider how far from obvious it is that works. Its purpose is instead, Rorty solidarity stands opposed to objectivity. avers, to devise by reasoned argument Agreement with others can take a variety ever more satisfactory syntheses of theo- of forms, depending on the motives that ry and experiment. So too, our moral move us to pursue it. Sometimes, for in- stance, going along with whatever our 8 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope fellows say affords a cozy kind of com- (London: Penguin, 1999); and Rorty, “Solidar- ity or Objectivity?” in Rorty, Objectivity, Rela- panionship. But what makes reasoned tivism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- agreement a good worth achieving, if versity Press, 1991), 21–34. not that it enhances our prospects of

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/0011526041504498 by guest on 01 October 2021 grasping the way things truly are? The thought answerable to the world. Soli- History & opposition between solidarity and objec- darity and objectivity go hand in hand. truth tivity proves evanescent. The best way to A similar verdict applies to the allied see this is to look again, but now more dualism he often deploys between cop- closely, at reason and justi½cation. ing and copying. Different descriptions Deliberating about whether to accept of the same thing can prove appropriate, a problematic statement consists, as depending on which of our various pur- Rorty says, in determining how well it poses we are pursuing and which audi- ½ts with our existing beliefs. Reason ence we are therefore addressing. Some- may guide the appraisal, but the require- times we speak of water as a collection H O ments that we see reason imposing re- of 2 molecules, sometimes as an es- flect the changing self-understanding of sential nutrient for all of life. Does this the community of inquiry to which we mean, as Rorty argues, that our talk aims belong. All this is correct. merely at being useful, not at represent- Yet it offers no basis for denying that ing the way the world is in itself? Once truth forms the object of our endeavors again, we are given a false alternative– –and truth conceived as ½tting the way utility and truth are inseparable. We can- the world really is, as correspondence not cope with the things around us un- with reality. Indeed, the practice makes less we consider how the world looks no sense without that idea. For what from the particular angle we have cho- serves to justify or disqualify the state- sen. Agreed, no single description is the ment under scrutiny is not the psycho- one and only true description. But the logical fact that we hold the beliefs to existence of many equally true ones mir- which we appeal. Our own state of rors the fact, as I suggested before, that mind, in and of itself, has no bearing on the world itself comprises multiple lev- the issue. The probative consideration is els of reality.9 Water is both those rather, so we presume, that the beliefs things, and a lot more besides. are true–in other words, that the world is as they describe it to be. Justifying a These remarks about Rorty imply that hypothesis means, in turn, showing that scienti½c growth must also count as it deserves to stand alongside our estab- progress toward the truth, when the se- lished beliefs, to join them in their role ries of later theories building upon earli- as premises for the resolution of future er ones results in some element of our doubts. It follows that when we examine present understanding of the natural the credentials of a problematic proposi- world. I am not suggesting that the two tion, our intention is to settle whether it concepts are synonymous after all. But matches the way the world really is. the only way in which growth may fall Background beliefs may themselves be short of being progress is by failing to mistaken, and we can always err in what produce beliefs of the sort we ourselves we say about reality. Fallibility, however, endorse. (Thus in Ptolemy’s hands the does not make truth any less our goal. geocentric theory grew in sophistica- Rorty is right that justi½cation proceeds tion, without moving any closer to the by appeal to what we already believe, truth about the planetary motions.) For by seeking conclusions that others to believe that something is the case equipped with similar beliefs can equally see reason to embrace. Yet this very ac- 9 Cf. John Dupré, The Disorder of Things (Cam- tivity is indissociable from making our bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/0011526041504498 by guest on 01 October 2021 Charles means holding it to be true, and if our lose its authority to regulate our thought Larmore on current beliefs about nature are the out- and to determine the progress we have progress come of a self-correcting process, which achieved. To have good grounds to alter the history of modern science has unde- our beliefs is to have learned from our niably involved, then this process merits mistakes, and such are the terms in the title of progress. Where past views which we should also view the changes do not ½t our present convictions they that the notion of reason has undergone. must be deemed false, and where they As the history of science demonstrates, were corrected so as to yield what we we have learned how to learn in the very presently believe, we must suppose that process of learning about nature.10 In we have drawn closer to grasping the other words, the principles of rationality world as it really is. we have come to accept are themselves To be sure, truth is then being judged truths, about how we ought to think and by existing standards. Yet, one might conduct our inquiries into nature, that ask, what other standards should we use we now hold to be timelessly, universal- instead? Rorty and many others today ly, valid. But as essentially the result of a share a de½ning assumption of the no- learning process, they cannot count as tion of progress they seek to overturn. timelessly accessible. They assume that we would be entitled The idea of moral progress lends itself to consider ourselves nearer the truth to a similar reconstruction, though I do than our predecessors, only if we could not have the room to tackle this complex rise above our historical situation and subject here. For it would ½rst be neces- vindicate our present views from a van- sary to explain how such a thing as mor- tage point outside the vicissitudes of ex- al knowledge is possible.11 And then I perience. That is why, arguing rightly would have to point out how the parallel that our idea of reason is part and parcel between moral and scienti½c progress of our changing web of belief, they go on nonetheless ceases at a crucial point. to reject truth as the goal of inquiry. Moral progress consists not only in a Precisely this assumption is the dogma deeper understanding of the right and we need to dispel. The real revolution in the good, but also in the achievement of philosophy would be to regard the con- a better life–and one of the important tingencies of history as the means by truths we have learned is that every way which we lay hold of reality. We cannot of life secures some things of value at the look back (as Hegel supposed) and see in expense of others. Gains come with loss- the developments leading to our current es. Because science aims simply at body of beliefs a path that mankind was knowledge, scienti½c progress does not destined to travel. What we can do is involve an analogous balancing of pluses show how our present views represent and minuses. an improvement over earlier ones, and, In both domains, however, the way to the extent that we can do so, we ought forward is to break the grip that the old to conclude that the reasons for prefer- dualisms continue to have on the philo- ring the new to the old are reasons for sophical mind, even among those who thinking we have now a better compre- hension of the way the world is. 10 Cf. Dudley Shapere, Reason and the Search for The principles by which we make Knowledge (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Reidel, 1984), 233. these judgments may themselves change as our conception of nature changes. But 11 See my book, The Morals of Modernity (Cam- reason, though historicized, does not bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 54 Dædalus Summer 2004

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/0011526041504498 by guest on 01 October 2021 claim to ½ght against them. Truth itself History & is timeless; if Newtonian mechanics truth now appears importantly mistaken, then it was always false, even in its heyday. Our thinking takes place necessarily in time, and has no other resources than those that the past and our own imagi- nation happen to provide us. Yet the ½nitude that marks every step we take tracks the world that lies beyond. Rea- soning from where we ½nd ourselves means reasoning about the way things really are. As T. S. Eliot wrote in Burnt Norton, “only through time time is con- quered.”

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